Biting through the Skin

An Indian Kitchen in America's Heartland

Nina Mukerjee Furstenau

Publication Year: 2013

At once a traveler’s tale, a memoir, and a mouthwatering cookbook, Biting through the Skin offers a first-generation immigrant’s perspective on growing up in America’s heartland. Author Nina Mukerjee Furstenau’s parents brought her from Bengal in northern India to the small town of Pittsburg, Kansas, in 1964, decades before you could find long-grain rice or plain yogurt in American grocery stores. Embracing American culture, the Mukerjee family ate hamburgers and softserve ice cream, took a visiting guru out on the lake in their motorboat, and joined the Shriners. Her parents transferred the cultural, spiritual, and family values they had brought with them to their children only behind the closed doors of their home, through the rituals of cooking, serving, and eating Bengali food and making a proper cup of tea.

As a girl and a young woman, Nina traveled to her ancestral India as well as to college and to Peace Corps service in Tunisia. Through her journeys and her marriage to an American man whose grandparents hailed from Germany and Sweden, she learned that her family was not alone in being a small pocket of culture sheltered from the larger world. Biting through the Skin shows how we maintain our differences as well as how we come together through what and how we cook and eat. In mourning the partial loss of her heritage, the author finds that, ultimately, heritage always finds other ways of coming to meet us. In effect, it can be reduced to a 4 x 6-inch recipe card, something that can fit into a shirt pocket. It’s on just such tiny details of life that belonging rests.

In this book, the author shares her shirt-pocket recipes and a great deal more, inviting readers to join her on her journey toward herself and toward a vital sense of food as culture and the mortar of community.

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Author’s Note

Prologue

I learned this from Joan Ruvinsky, a meditation teacher. If you throw wood
into a fire, it burns; put food into your stomach, it does the same. For years, I
did not notice that I was a version of larger elements. Blood runs through veins
like rivers, through capillaries like lesser tributaries, some unseen under the
skin, ...

1. Transformation

There is something to be done at this season. Something to be done.
I tap my pencil on the island counter and look outside my kitchen
window at rolling Missouri farmland, brittle-brown and orange as
it always is at this time of year. The festival of Bijoya Dashami means good
wishes need to be passed on to family elders and friends; ...

2. Two Brides

My part of the Mukerjee-Banerji narrative begins with spices. Women
have always wielded ginger in my family: ginger as well as many
other tiny pieces of larger things. I was too young to ask which
spices my mother used in Kansas and my grandmother used during my first
trips to India, but my nose selected what it needed. ...

3. Little India

This having-a-cook idea was added to the list of all tantalizing Indian
things I could just remember but which were out of my reach by the
age of eight: sidewalks full of people who looked like me, billboards
full of movie stars with chocolate-brown eyes, ceiling fans, tea served on
marble verandas. ...

4. Journey

We went by car, plane, taxi, and train. We used every mode of
transportation except those by sea to get my family of four from
Kansas to Bengal. By the end of it, my parents were closing their
eyes to ward off the monotony, but on that train to Bihar at the age of eight, ...

5. Table Grace

My parents relished eating in the Indian way at times, taking care
to use only the ends of their fingers. Nothing is as clean as the
human body, no utensil washed indifferently, certainly. The tactile
feel of food on the fingers, too, was part of the experience. ...

6. Small Things Satisfied

Back from India, the four of us dropped back into routine. I found
myself helping Mom with chops in the kitchen. Mom’s cream and
orange-trimmed curtains fluttered around a slice of backyard and
I could see the honeysuckle bush nestled against my bedroom window. ...

7. Indian Breads

When it was nearly five o’clock, I slipped back inside and heard
a rolling pin slapping against the countertop as Mom shaped
roti into exact rounds. She did not make these every day, so the
rhythmic sounds of bread making were intoxicating. ...

8. Grand Lake Menu for a Guru

I was eleven when the theology I had so wished for came to our house garbed
in the saffron robes of a holy man. Mahananda Swami, a slightly built,
bearded guru, emerged in front of 1403 S. Homer from a tan Buick LeSabre. ...

9. An Indian Kitchen in Kansas

Though issues of theology, even before Swami’s visit, always teased
at the edges of my mind, by second grade, I was often in a world of
fantasy. I knew what reality was, sure, but I preferred daydreams:
pleasant ones about flying a one-girl aircraft I called a hover around the
neighborhood. ...

10. Attic Fans and Flying Typewriters

This is what changed the food I ate for dinner: a boy slid a window up
in language arts class and threw out a typewriter. It was during the
fourth quarter of my seventh-grade year. The row of six-by-three-foot
wood-framed windows that lined the outside walls of our school had iron pulls
along the bottom and a latch lock halfway up on the cross trim. ...

11. Mother Tongue

Bengali, my mother tongue, was something I took right out of the air
only to give it away. My parents would speak, mumble, or laugh it
out loud, unafraid of my stealth. Of course, my first efforts at speech
were feeble, focused on food and comfort. ...

12. On the Road with Amiya and Rani

In 1974, the year I was twelve, my grandparents came to Kansas. Even before
my grandparents’ arrival, my friends realized I had a separate culture
at home, but the presence of a sari-clad grandmother and a grandfather
with an Indo-British accent made it undeniable, more so when they began
appearing around town. ...

13. All Our Tupperware Is Stained with Turmeric

About three miles from our house, I sighted my horizons with an outstretched
thumb and forefinger and squinted at undulating wheat.
I had ridden my bike, passing edge-of-town neighborhoods, then
clusters of scrubby trees, to reach a gravel road. ...

14. Strength of a Nation

Kansas life was encompassing and my connection to India waned. I
liked our food but I had no other calling card. I had aged out of that
grace period of youth when all I had to do was eat a sweet and grin
at my parents’ Indian friends. Relatives, especially, expected more of me now. ...

15. Street Foods

Some stories evoke untroubled times, golden days that transport
your mind, make you forget everything but the tenderness and
exhilaration of those far-flung images. While attending the Bihar
College of Engineering in Patna from 1948 to 1952, my father went once
in a while for coffee with friends. ...

16. Six Recipe Cards, a Wing and a Prayer, Circa 1984

As with my grandmother and mother before me, an astonishing network
of mothers, aunts, and cousins, epic really in its proportions, reached
out to me in Kansas when I was seventeen in 1979. It was because
of Indian boys. Other than my brother and a son of a family friend who had
lived in Pittsburg and then moved, ...

17. Bishshwayya

The recipe cards I wrote that day felt like the sum of what I carried
forward into my life from a previous distinct ethnicity. Six pieces
of cardstock, small enough to fit in my pocket, were distilled from
generations of my family. A month later, armed with my RECIDEX and a
sun hat, I set off. ...

18. A (Not So) Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Didu’s House

In 1985, between our two Peace Corps years, and thirteen years after my
grandparents ventured to the Midwest, I took a midwestern farm boy to
Bihar. My dadu came to the airport to pick us up in the cream-colored
Ambassador. ...

19. Pop Culture India

It was morning in early summer. A recent rain had freshened the air and
as I bent over a puddle reflecting sky it was disorienting, like peering
into a vast underground, and I jerked back. Nature was enjoying herself.
Around me, my Missouri garden unfolded like art. ...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.